Kickstarter Bids Farewell To Amazon Payments To Welcome Stripe

Crowdfunding site Kickstarter has announced in a blog post that it will be partnering with the payments service Stripe. That means it is to ditch Amazon Payments in favor of the Silicon Valley startup, to make things easier for artists and inventors alike.

The company will handle all credit card transactions on the site, which will make things simpler for both: creators, who now won’t have to create an Amazon Payments business account and wait for approval; and backers, who can pledge money to a project they’re interested in with just fewer steps.

“Stripe will help Kickstarter’s users reach a broader audience and see higher conversion rates from backers anywhere in the world – especially those coming from mobile devices,” the company says.

Kickstarter has given a brief detail about the simple process, which will require creators of the project to enter their bank account details on the Account tab when drafting the project on the site. This whole process will now take just two minutes, whereas the old method used to take a few days. The company has shown a draft prototype of the form to be filled for the process:

While it is all rainbows and sunshine at Stripe’s end, Kickstarter’s decision is the opposite for Amazon which, to date has over 200 million credit cards on file and has since been long trying to figure out something to do of this humongous database of customer payments information.

One thing from this move is clear: Stripe is continuing to change the process of online payments with its system, which makes it easier for any online service or smartphone app to process payments at low cost.

From this, we can judge that stripe’s eventual goal is to develop a basic and common Internet infrastructure to allow online payments move fluidly across any platform through any network, which would be as simple as the exchange of content in the big, interconnected world of the Internet.

Stripe already processes the purchases of tech giants like Facebook and Twitter. It also provides the structure of Apple Pay, Apple’s smartphone payment system.

However, the company’s head is not stuck in the higher skies, it also powers smaller set ups too, like Lyft and Internet-grocery-delivery outfit Instacart. Mobile payments have now become so rife that they are estimated to hit a whopping $1 trillion in 2017, according to research firm IDC.

Kickstarter will start converting projects over to Stripe immediately, and by next week, the online payment system would be in place for all new projects.